Shining Through (37 page)

Maintenance men, conductors, but one cousin was a motorman.

They looked up to him like he’d gone to Harvard. ‘Jim’s a motorman!’”

Again he said, “I’m sorry, Linda.”

“It’s okay. They’re not such a close family, and they’re kind of dumb, but they always show up for funerals. I’ll have to call one of them.” That’s when I started to shake. My whole body started to shiver as if I’d climbed out of a hot bath into a cold room. I hugged myself and rubbed my arms to try and control it, but it only got worse. “I can’t remember any phone numbers,”

I said. My voice sounded screechy.

SHINING THROUGH / 275

“Do you know where my address book is? The little one, with the alphabet tabs?”

He helped me up and led me toward the door, one hand around my waist, the other steering me by my elbow. “We’ll find it when we get home.” He was so soothing.

I jerked my elbow out of his grasp, went back to my desk and started piling up the folders I’d been working on. John came up beside me, as if to stop me, but I snapped, “Classified documents.

I have to put them in the safe.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to say ‘Of course.’ I’m not going to get hysterical!” I wasn’t hysterical, but I was trembling so hard by then that I could barely stand, much less walk. I grabbed up the papers and tried to cross the room. I banged into the safe. “Oh, damn it, John.”

“It’s all right,” he said, his voice patient, tolerant. “I’ll take care of everything.”

And he did. Well, for the next three days, because, as he explained, he couldn’t stay away from Washington that long, but he got me home, packed, called Edward to explain I’d be gone, eased me into a cab to Union Station, where—despite the mobs of soldiers and sailors pushing to the ticket windows—he got us a private compartment on the next train to New York. He would even have been willing to talk to me the whole trip. How are you holding up? he’d asked, sitting back, obviously prepared for four hours of hearing the answer, but I’d said, “Okay, I guess,” and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, the train was in Newark, New Jersey.

In New York, in a hotel that overlooked Central Park, he spoke to the minister again, arranged for a burial service Wednesday morning, and then asked me, very gently, if I wanted to see my mother. When I said yes, he didn’t even blink; he took me in a taxi to Hannemann’s Funeral Home in Ridgewood.

I gazed down at my mother. The heavy funeral parlor makeup job, with its crimson bow lips and bright rouged 276 / SUSAN ISAACS

cheeks, did nothing to disguise the fact that she had died a sick, wasted woman. Other than the dress Cookie had picked out for her—one of my mother’s typical choices, a ridiculous pink gingham pinafore suitable for a fourteen-year-old—there was no sign that this old woman had been a beautiful, sweet-natured, not-too-bright goodtime girl. Her blond hair had turned a dingy white.

She lay in a coffin that had obviously been her son-in-law’s choice: a dark, costly wood, but with simple brass handles and plain white satin lining. A casket for a proper citizen; she would have chosen something decorated with gold cherubs and lined in lilac velveteen. And if it had been up to my mother, the coffin would have been covered with a blanket of flowers more appropriate for the winner of the Kentucky Derby. John had chosen a perfect wreath of white flowers that looked like it had been made up by the Leland family florist and probably had been. I didn’t ask.

John stood right beside me the entire time, waiting, I guess, for a moan of despair or a shriek of anguish to break out of me, so he could do something—hold me in his arms, lead me away and say, There, there. Once he glanced down at me and said, You’re very pale; he may have been expecting a swoon or a faint. But I just stood straight and still, and thought about my mother and father and Olga—and for some reason about Alfred Eckert too. And I asked myself, Who do I really have in the world who loves me?

At last I said, I’m ready, and John led me outside, but not before Mr. Hannemann, Jr., came rushing out of his office to hold the door open for us. His voice was thick with respect and courtesy:
So
sorry for your loss, Mrs. Berringer. If we can serve you in any other way, I
do
hope you’ll call on us. He made it so much worse for me, because his was the tone people in Ridgewood took with important people, and all of a sudden I felt even lonelier. I’d lost the last of my family. I’d become a rich lawyer’s wife in expensive shoes, an outsider.

The taxi was waiting outside, meter running, and I asked John, Do you want to see our house? And he said, I really would like to, but we have to get back to Manhattan. You SHINING THROUGH / 277

need a dress for the funeral, and I have to go over your mother’s papers. I stared at him and he explained, I called Russ Weedcock at the firm and had him send over one of the secretaries to get your mother’s papers together. I asked, Which secretary? and he shrugged, with a what-does-it-matter offhandedness. I looked down at my twenty-five-dollar black-and-white spectator pumps, which I now knew should only be worn between Decoration Day and Labor Day, and I thought: Where do I belong?

When we got back to the city, John said, I think you should rest. I’ll have Saks send over a few things to the hotel so you don’t have to deal with salespeople.

You’re being so nice, I said. John, thank you. I appreciate everything you’re doing. You’re really a wonderful husband. He said, Please…Don’t be embarrassed, I told him.

John put through a long-distance call to my Aunt Annabel in Seattle. The Johnstons were a little vague about family ties.

Forget Christmas cards; my mother had completely lost touch with three of her four sisters. I got on the phone: Aunt Annabel, this is Linda. Betty’s daughter. She started crying, and for a minute I thought she’d heard. Then she told me her husband, a navy man, had been killed in June, at Midway. She said, He was on the
Yorktown
, Linda. You hear about it? She cried some more and said her older boy was 4-F, but the younger one was a midshipman on the U.S.S.
Saratoga
. His name’s Lester, she said, and then, without taking a breath, she asked, Did Betty die? Yes, I told her. She told me she was sorry and to send her love to everybody when I saw them at the funeral.

That night we had room service. Um, John said, your mother didn’t leave a will. I answered, Estate planning was never her strong point. He went on: Her only assets were the house and a very small bank account. I looked up from my steak: You thought you were marrying an heiress? No, he said. I just wanted to keep you informed…as your attorney. Actually, I’ve asked Russ to handle whatever has to be handled. Is that all right with you? I told him, sure it was fine.

278 / SUSAN ISAACS

The bad part of being a working girl—and an old maid—is that you learn to do things for yourself, so when a husband finally comes along, you forget to be fluttery and helpless. This was the first time John had really done anything for me.

When we got into bed I said, You’re so good at everything.

He said, You don’t have to if you don’t want to, and then I realized he thought I was talking about sex. I pressed up against him. No, I want to, I said. But hold me for a while first. He put his arms around me, but since neither of us was wearing anything, it took much less than a while. He climbed on top of me and I ran my fingers down his back, over his behind and then lower. Oh, Jesus, he groaned. You do it to me every time. Linda, I can’t take it. I moved my hand away and let my fingers drift down the backs of his thighs.

Want me to stop? I asked.

No. Oh, Christ, do it some more.

I love you.

Do it more.

Okay. “Do it more” wasn’t French for “I love you.” But that night I went to sleep with more hope than I’d ever had since my marriage. John had been so tender, so decent. Not just since my mother died; even the biggest crumb in the world can manage to act appropriately for a couple of days when there’s a death in the family. But he’d been so wonderful during the weekend in Maryland.

As I fell asleep, I only wished the change in John had happened one week sooner, so I would have had time to call my mother and say, Hey, Mom. You were wrong about him.

He’s really a good man. And I think he’s learning to love me.

“‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, yea, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’”

The Reverend Bradley Norris of Brooklyn, the burier of Johnstons, had a voice that sounded like Cecil B. De Mille’s in a coming attraction for
The Sign of the Cross
: resounding, important, slightly British. But he was a very old man, probably close to eighty, and pretty frail. And poor. His black suit SHINING THROUGH / 279

was so worn it had a silver shine. He kept squinting in the blinding July sunlight and losing his place in the prayerbook.

“‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Even as it hath pleased the Lord, so cometh…so cometh…’”

One of the cousins—I think her name was Etta—shouted out,

“‘…so cometh things to pass’!”

I flashed her an angry look, but the Reverend Norris was either one of the genuinely meek or he was too old for out-rage. He just brought the prayerbook up closer to his nose and continued,

“‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’”

It was hot in that Brooklyn cemetery. The grass around the tombstones had large, parched patches, and a lot of the earth dug up around my mother’s grave was dry. I couldn’t make myself look down into the grave, even though we were standing pretty near the edge.

John had his arm around my shoulder, both for comfort and for support, but I didn’t feel I was going to lose control. I looked out at the cousins—more than twenty had come—and even though they were my family, I hardly knew half their names.

They were a group of strangers who knew “The Order for the Burial of the Dead” the way I knew “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I felt like an outsider at a ceremony for a member of a club I didn’t belong to.

And yet the weird thing was, when I looked out over that cluster of Johnstons, I knew I was in the club. I could see my mother’s features in so many faces—a couple of them as beautiful as hers had once been. And I even saw variations of myself there: my hair on Ralph, Agatha and a boy of about seventeen; my exact eyes—the precise shade of brown and even the straight lashes that I bet were also immune to an eyelash curler—on a former Johnston who’d introduced herself as Lorna, although in her Brooklyn accent, a hundred times thicker than mine, which John had to control himself from shuddering from, it sounded more like Lawww-na.

The minister droned on: “‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower…’”

John whispered, “How are you doing?”

280 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Fine.” But I pressed against him even more. The relatives had obviously heard about John, and it was just as obvious by the way they were gaping at everything from the part in his hair to his perfectly polished shoes that they were awed, except for one of them, whose name I didn’t catch. She’d taken him aside while we were waiting for the Reverend Norris and asked him if he would sue her dry cleaner for her because he’d ruined her husband’s overcoat. John told her he was sorry, but he was in Washington now and wasn’t practicing law in New York. Don’t worry, she said, I’ll
pay
you, and when he told her he couldn’t, she looked disgusted.

“‘In the midst of life we be in death.’” I thought: Come on. In Brooklyn? But then I thought: In Berlin. “‘Of whom may we seek for succor but thee, Oh Lord, which for our sins justly art displeased.’” Alfred, I said to myself, this funeral’s for you too.

I bet you didn’t have one. And so, as the minister went on, I translated a few sentences into German in my head for Alfred.

“‘…ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life…’” I thought, still in German: Alfred, I hope it’s not only eternal; I hope it’s beautiful and elegant, the way you like it. “‘Death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory?’”

The Reverend Norris intoned: “‘Lord have mercy on us.’” I thought again about my mother and hoped that for her, heaven would be a rose-covered honeymoon cottage where my father would be waiting. And for my Grandma Olga—But at that very instant the minister proclaimed, “‘Christ have mercy on us.’” I said Whoops! to myself, put Olga off, and instead said silently,

‘Bye, Mom. At last, the Reverend Norris said, “‘Lord have mercy upon us,’” again.

But I guess I’d already mourned Olga and my father enough, because instead of giving them their turn, I thought about the men and women and even little kids who’d been shot and burned and bombed in the lousy, goddamn war. Slaughtered. And that’s when I wept. O Lord, I thought, have mercy on us.

SHINING THROUGH / 281

John asked, Are you sure you’ll be all right? The limousine he’d hired for the funeral pulled up in front of my mother’s house. His eyes widened for a second, but then he composed his face into a bland expression, as if this was the sort of house he saw all the time. Through his eyes I suddenly saw the sagging roof and the tape on the windows where they’d cracked, and that’s when I realized we had been poor.

I inched forward to the car door, but the damp black silk of my dress stuck to the back seat. He went on: Linda, I hate leaving you like this, but I have to get back to Washington. He kissed me softly on the eyes, and the driver slid out silently to get my suitcase from the trunk.

I tried to sound reassuring: Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. What I really wanted was for him to say, “Oh, the hell with the OSS!”

and stay with me. John kissed my fingers. I’ll call you every night, he said, and if it gets to be too much, let me know. I’ll come back. But I just gave him a final kiss goodbye, got out of the car and watched it as it pulled away, like a big, black yacht, and eased down the street toward Manhattan and Penn Station.

I thought I’d just sit in the kitchen and stare out the window at the Knauers’ elm tree that afternoon, but instead I took off my heels and went to work on my mother’s room. After six hours, all I could salvage from the mess of her life was her wedding ring, a gold bracelet, a picture of her and my father on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and the silliest of her dresses—a slinky purple thing with two giant roses of the same fabric sewed onto each bust.